I sold off the last of my Apple stock this week. In typical fashion, it shot up 5% the day after the sale cleared. I got no manner of luck at all, as a former co-worker at Cupertino Hexachrome Fruit might have said. Coincidentally, the day I made the sale was the day I took delivery of a Dell Inspiron Mini 1012 netbook, bought with birthday money and credit card reward points. First time I bought myself a laptop in literally a decade – and for an order of magnitude less than the last one I bought. (Some wags might say I got an order of magnitude less computer, too – but 1 GB of RAM and 160GB hard drive kick the shit out of anything that iBook SE could have managed. Screen’s higher-res too, and the Atom N450 beats the G3 and probably kills it on battery life too.)
This netbook’s machine name is “Strumpet.” So far, it came with WinXP and has been made to run Ubuntu, Ubuntu Netbook Remix, Xubuntu, Chromium and Jolicloud. In fact, all those but Ubuntu and Chromium are on the hard drive now. And since UNR and XUbuntu have had kernel updates since the last 9.10 release, and since there’s a Dell partition for hardware test and etc, there are literally ten or eleven different entries when GRUB loads up at boot. I’m still looking at install options for things like Easy Peasy, too.
Ultimately I decided not to get the older 10v, which is generally considered the gold standard for Hackintosh building (to the point where a well-known political blogger who is not known for technical wizardry was able to convert hers in under an hour). My reasoning is that after 12 years in support, with multiple certifications in hardware and software, I know the Mac environment well enough that forcing OS X onto a weak Dell would be more of an exercise in masochism than a legit learning experience. So I do Mac stuff on – gasp! – a Mac. Even if they yanked my MBP tomorrow, all my home stuff resides on the Mac mini in the office, and I could sync the iPhone to it on a regular basis.
This – and my previous musings about the Nexus One, and my expenditure of cash to convert most of my iTunes Music Store purchases to an un-DRM’d format – should not be taken as any sort of indication that I have run out on Apple. On the contrary, I still think that Apple’s particular genius is in making things accessible enough for Them Asses while still offering a glide path up to more technical experiences if you like. The reason I’m able to run all my business at work drum-tight is because OS X is the best consumer OS ever, and it comes on standard and reliable hardware.
If somebody else came out with something better, though, I would go like a shot. And while I don’t think any of the Linuxes above are necessarily better, they are something else: a step toward a new future of low-cost computing. Think about it – you could take out 2 of the 3 USB ports and the VGA, replace the 160 GB hard drive with 4 GB of flash memory, and as long as you’re willing to do all significant file storage in the cloud, you still have computer enough for 90% of everything I do. It’s the circle of life; after all these years we’re back to the same old model. Time was, it was mainframes with terminals. Then words like “client/server” and “network computing” were thrown around. Now it’s called the Cloud, and the original meaning (“cloud computing” meant that actual processing power, not just data, lived in the cloud) has given way to this vision that all your stuff can just reside somewhere out there in the ether. Which, as far as most computer users are concerned, it already does.
It’s cheaper, too – once you build out your data center with multiple redundancies and six-nines reliability, you can add users at the marginal cost of a login account (and hell, maybe $200 worth of netbook or smartphone). Serious processing can take place on the back end; all you really need is enough to run a display, a screen-scraper, a network connection and some user inputs. Park one of those data-center-in-a-truck things, connect it to the phone system, hand out netbooks with cellular cards, and just like that, your neighborhood or village or whatever is right online.
More important, it’s critical not to get stuck into your product loyalties for the wrong reasons. If I wear Dr Martens, or Levis 501s, or use a MacBook Pro or drive a VW, it’s not because I believe that these companies represent some sort of higher purpose or morality or world-changing vision – it’s because, for me, their shit works. If it stopped working, I would go elsewhere (see: Saturn, Reebok, UniBall Micro) and if they went elsewhere, I would find something else (see: Britches of Georgetown, Saturn, Bahia Cigars). I think ascribing some sort of post-materialist aspirations to your vendors – Google would never be evil, Apple is all that is right with the universe, Ford is, well, whatever Ford is – is ultimately as foolish as the notion of corporations with personhood and rights. A company exists for one reason alone: to make money. Not to pave the way to a brighter future, not to make you feel good about yourself, not to bring freedom to TheM asses or what have you. If that happens, great, but the stockholders aren’t going to give a shit about all the snowy plovers you saved with box tops if you’re hemorrhaging profits.
So I have a Mac mini, an iPhone, and a Dell. And that’s what works for me today.